When the food was ready Jolo stumbled back onto the porch feeling much better than he had in a long time. Katy and Bertha were smiling at him and he was grinning.
“Now, that’s an authentic smile, Captain,” said Bertha. Katy put her arm around him and for a moment he felt lighter, like maybe this is how normal people felt.
Pretty soon a little girl came with a big plate of food. “Cap’n Jolo,” she said. “Thank you for your help.” And everyone around started clapping. The rest of the crew were served next and everyone enjoyed the last of the vegetables they’d harvested before the crops were destroyed.
“Do you feel it?” said Katy. “They love you.”
Jolo looked at her. “They don’t know what I am.”
“Most do. And they don’t care.”
“It’s not what you are, it’s what you do that counts,” said Bertha. “These people are precious to me. And I trust you with them. I know you would never let us down.”
That night Jolo lay in bed but still couldn’t get the day out of his mind. He kept thinking about the woman in the blue dress. Why did he care what she or the crewman or anyone from the Fed thought? And then his mind turned to the BG boat. Why had it attacked? What could they gain? Was this the start of the war between the BG and the Fed?
……
The next morning George woke up Jolo before light. “Captain, I just got a message from the network.” The network was a loose intruder warning system that covered most of the planet Duval. Each node was responsible for watching several square kilometers and reported any BG or Fed boats entering the atmosphere. Bertha’s house was a node on the northern end and Marco’s was the southernmost node in the net. The system was based on old radio tech and never went down. Radios were easy to find and would usually run forever, and most were solar powered so energy to run them was not an issue either.
“What’s up?” said Jolo.
“A BG boat set down about 100 kilo’s north of here.”
“Another listening station?”
“I don’t know. You wanna check it out?”
Computer, Jolo thought, how far apart do listening stations need to be on a planet the size of Duval?
Given a similar mass and density and a radius of no more than 6,358.2 kilometers, each listening point should cover 500 square kilometers.
“It can’t be a listening station. It’s too close to the one they just made,” said Jolo.
“That is correct,” said George.
“I’ll go alone, there’s a water reclamator not too far from there. I’ll bring some tools and pretend to be doing maintenance.”
It was still dark in the big house and Jolo went to the kitchen for coffee. Bertha and Katy were already there. Katy had her boots on and her rucksack, round and full, was sitting on the table.
“Taking a trip?” said Jolo.
“Yep. Thought we could do some sightseeing.”
“Okay,” Jolo said. “You come with me. The rest of the crew stays here just in case. We need to make sure that BG boat ain’t a threat before we leave.”
So Jolo and Katy headed north into the gray early light of day on one of Bertha’s hover bikes. The morning was cool and Jolo thought to make good time. It was mostly a flat stretch of cracked clay and the bike would get them there in under an hour. There were several hills he had to navigate around first, then they dropped into the long straight stretch of red clay that Duval was famous for and he fully engaged the mini-Quarton 4 thrusters and the bike leapt forward. Katy, who sat behind him, wrapped her arms around him tightly when the bike gained speed.
“Hang on,” he said over the comm. “I’m going to make time.”
“Roger that.”
Jolo pushed the bike even harder, the Quartons’ high-pitched whine mixed with the rush of wind. Katy pressed her body even closer to his and for the second time since he came to Bertha’s he had to smile. Feeling her close to him gave him a deep sense of calm and happiness he hadn’t felt in a long time. Maybe this was some memory from his former self. He wished the reclamators were five hours away instead of just one.
Fifty-three minutes later Jolo saw the long line of shiny reclamators come into view. They stopped and Jolo quickly spread out the tools on the dry ground and opened up one of the inlet valves and brown water trickled out. Then he disassembled the water catch and lay it on the ground. They had to make it look good, like this is what they were actually doing. The big, black BG boat loomed in the distance. Jolo could see it clearly about 75 meters away.
Jolo was about to crawl under one of the reclamators when Katy squatted down next to him, the large water catch offering a bit of shade. “Why were you so down last night?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who cares what those Fed bastards think. It’s all propaganda anyway.”
“Is it?”
“Do I really have to answer that?”
“At
